How the Fractured Chiropractor Shot to the Top of Google Rankings
Lake Medical & Chiropractic in San Marcos, California is a great Chiropractic practice! I should know – I’ve been a satisfied patient there for over 4 years. It’s a high quality, mature, multi-disciplinary practice with 3 Chiropractors and an MD. They’ve been in business for 24 years, don’t do any advertising and get the majority of their new patients via referrals. They hardly got any new patients calls from the Internet due to low ranking and poor visibility.
In April I decided to do some research on their Internet presence and discovered that not only did they have poor rankings but their practice identity on Google was ‘badly fractured’. When I tried to explain what that meant to Dr. Jeppesen he laughed and quipped: “Why are we talking to you then??? Sounds like we need to call in the Ortho specialist!” 
Long story short, I took them from the 3rd page of Google maps, where no one looks, to the #2 spot at the top of the 1st page of Google. I’m still working on repairing all the fractures and Google has not updated yet with all the optimization I have done. So I predict in another month they will be #1.
AND HOW I GOT THIS PRACTICE TO THE TOP of GOOGLE
Here’s the
link to the search results page – See #2 ranking below.
OK so to start let’s talk about FRACTURED listings. This often happens in Chiropractic, Medical and Dental offices, due to Google pulling data from numerous sources that may have the practice listed different ways. Google then sets up multiple Google Place pages thinking they are different businesses. Additionally many times a practice sets up a new listing not realizing Google already created one, which also creates a duplicate.
1st of all – important to realize having duplicate Google Places pages is against the Google’s TOS and can get you penalized. Just as import, is the fact that Google’s algorithm attributes various trust factors to Place pages. In ultra simplified terms, the practice with the most trust factors ends up on top in Google. HOWEVER when you have fractured listings and duplicate Google Place pages it divides up those trust factors and hurts your rankings.
So in the case of Lake Medical & Chiropractic, they had a listing for Lake Medical Center, a listing for Lake Chiropractic Clinic and listings for each Dr. The practice names were both previous names so were listed that way with numerous upstream data providers. However their new CURRENT practice name is Lake Medical AND Chiropractic and that name was new so was nowhere to be found.
Additionally all the upstream data was badly fractured, not only due to the different practice names and Dr. names – but also different spellings of the address and 2 different phone numbers. Google only counts a trust vote if the Name, address and phone is EXACTLY the way it is listed on the Place page. So if Drive was abbreviated to Dr. in some listings and the other phone number was used, it would not count as a vote for the practice.
So I created a totally new Google Places listing for the new practice name “Lake Medical and Chiropractic” totally optimized the Places listing with all the things that I know help to boost ranking and began to work on merging and deleting all the other listings. Additionally I had to do numerous submissions to over 100 upstream data providers to try to correct all the incorrect practice data so it would match the new practice listing on Google.
SUCCESS TIMELINE: I started this case on April 20th 2010. On May 5th their listing jumped from page 3 on maps to #5 (out of 7) at the top of the 1st page on Google. On 5/25 the listing moved up to #2. I’m still working on repairing the fractures and Google has not updated yet all the optimization I’v done. So I predict in another month they will be #1. Feel free to watch their progress!
Additionally I re-wrote their homepage copy to make it more patient-centered, friendly and less clinical and made recommendations to improve their organic search engine ranking as well. They are currently on the 1st page, #7 in organic ranking. We are working on building a new web site, which should help too.
The net result? More new patients, greater visibility, enhanced branding and more time for the Drs. to do what they do best – take care of patients!
Here is what Dr. Lance Jeppesen has to say about the experience and about my service, from the review he just added to MY Google Places page.
Gifted in what she does! By Dr. Lance – Jun 2, 2010
We have a successful mature Chiropractic practice (24 years) with many happy patients, but couldn’t be found at the top of Google’s 1st page where new patients could find us. We were on page 3 of Google Maps and I would be surprised if anyone looks that deep while searching. Linda at Catalyst told us our listing was badly fractured with multiple Google Places listings under different variations of our practice name. As I stay busy with patient care and administration I was not even aware of the type of internet exposure and rankings.
After she worked on our account for 2 weeks we jumped to #5 on the 1st page of Google and now 2 weeks later we are #2, right at the top. It’s great getting calls from new patients from the web that may not have found us otherwise. Linda is great to work with and even helped re-write our homepage copy and made suggestions for improving the ranking on our web site. I found her very knowledgeable, proficient and to the point without hype – which is exactly what we needed.
FYI: This is the 2nd Chiropractic case study I have done. If you missed the 1st one, please read it here: Google Places Optimization: Tale of a Chiropractor that went from #44 to #1 on Google Local
Have questions about your Place listing, duplicate listings or merging? Feel free to contact me for a free consultation. Always happy to help!
Some link love for my Chiro for letting me publish this case history:
Lake Medical and Chiropractic – San Marcos, California – Web Site Link
View Larger Map
A few of the many listings I have gotten the practice so far:
Lake Medical & Chiropractic – The main San Diego News Site
Lake Medical & Chiropractic – Local Channel 10 News site
Lake Medical & Chiropractic – City Search
Lake Medical & Chiropractic – Kudzu
Lake Medical & Chiropractic – DexKnows
Attention SEOs, Agencies & Google Places Consultants
Best Google Places Software & FREE Local SEO Tools&
Linda Now Offers ADVANCED Google Places Training
Including: templates, time savers, forms, cool optimization tricks & lots more
New here? Subscribe to RSS feed or follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
#1 dave wrote on October 24, 2010 :
here is what i don’t understand linda. i have similar instances working with dentists. they have a lot of citations but they are fractured. how did it jump so fast in 2 weeks?
in my cases it takes months and months. they are listed as their business name and other times as a doctor…i will fix this and it still takes months for google to recognize them
#2 Linda Buquet wrote on October 24, 2010 :
Hi Dave,
I have the same situation as you do with most of my clients. Dupes can be a nightmare and take forever.
This story was sort of a unique situation where Google had associated a popular but very unique geo keyword with the Drs. location in the dupe and was pulling citations about that KW. So when I realized what Google was finding and associating with the dupe, I “helped” Google associate the info with the main listing instead. Hard to explain, but it worked really well and very fast.
But again it was a unique situation and most dupes take time.
#3 dave wrote on October 25, 2010 :
Hi Linda-
Whats really strange is that I picked up 3 dentists this past week and they all have the same issue. They each have a verified listing. I log in and the info under the edit area does match whats online.
There are no duplicates either. On all 3 I am able to upload photos and videos and respond to reviews, yet I can’t edit the categories or the description or addtl details.
I’m debating if I should delete the verified profile and start all over again as I see no other way.
It just seems odd that I can edit some information, but not the entire listing. Have you run into this and what would you do about it?
Dave
#4 Linda Buquet wrote on October 25, 2010 :
Yep Dave I’ve seen it lots of times. It’s merged data from a listing someone else created. I can usually tell who it was by looking at the listing. There are 2 companies that do a lot of Place pages for Dentists that don’t specialize in Google Places, so they often break numerous rules. I can usually tell by the rule violations which company did it.
But SOMEONE has partial control over the account and you’ll never get total control until you find out who and get them to go through a series of steps to correct the infractions if there are any, then remove the listing from their account.
No don’t delete. Never delete and start over. (Well hardly ever anyway.) You need to get to the root of the dupe.
#5 dave wrote on October 25, 2010 :
ha, i think i know those 2 companies you speak of!
well i can say with certainty that no one outside these companies worked on the listings.
ive checked and double checked to find any evidence of duplicate listings, but can’t find any.
i think my best course of action would be to correct the listings, wait a few weeks and see if the changes take and and the mean time keep building citations.
by the way, i think you have a great blog. fantastic catch finding the new (possible new) places layout!